PARIS, FRANCE - MARCH 04: Kirsten Dunst and Garrett Hedlund attend the Saint Laurent Fall/Winter 2013 Ready-to-Wear show as part of Paris Fashion Week on March 4, 2013 in Paris, France. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images) less

PARIS, FRANCE - MARCH 04: Kirsten Dunst and Garrett Hedlund attend the Saint Laurent Fall/Winter 2013 Ready-to-Wear show as part of Paris Fashion Week on March 4, 2013 in Paris, France. (Photo by Pascal Le ... more

Photo: Pascal Le Segretain, Getty Images

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Garrett Hedlund talks of 'On the Road'

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Garrett Hedlund is sitting in a hotel room in Toronto where his new film, "On the Road," is screening as part of the Toronto International Film Festival, but his mind is on San Francisco. The city is an important location not just in Jack Kerouac's classic Beat generation saga, but also in Kerouac's life and that of Neal Cassady, the man on whom the writer based his novel's hero, Dean Moriarty, the character Hedlund plays in the movie.

"San Francisco was an incredible help," Hedlund says. "I drove up there by myself and got a hotel and went out to sort of feel the city. Going to Vesuvio's and going to City Lights Bookstore, because I'd seen all the footage online of Allen Ginsberg and Neal sitting down there. Ginsberg's talking and they're much older. (Beat Museum founder) Jerry Cimino was very helpful when I went in there, I was grabbing all Neal material, letters from him in juvenile hall, write-ups of what he had done, the DVD of Neal wasted and on acid.

"I brought that to Mexico and was able to show Walter and the DP (director of photography) this footage and that's how we were able to film the contraction of the Mexican whorehouse dance," he adds. "Watching this footage and seeing how he was lost to the beat and everything, he was just flowing into the beat and it didn't matter - there was no self-awareness in terms of the movement."

In conversation, the 28-year-old actor is as voluble as Cassady's legend would have it and burning with the curiosity and energy that carries Moriarty through "On the Road." Hedlund clearly feels a connection to Kerouac's book. Growing up on a farm in Minnesota, he admits he wasn't much of a reader until one summer in high school when books became a passion.

"I wouldn't read 'Catcher in the Rye' when it was asked of us in class, so I cheated my way through it," he remembers. "Over that summer, I think, was when I started to be on the brink of being inspired by all this stuff. I started trying to read everything I could read.

"I was just hitting Barnes & Noble every night and reading books, because I couldn't afford them. I would just dog-ear the corner and put the books back so nobody would buy them by the next night, so I could continue on."

It was during one of his trips to the bookstore when he was 17 that he discovered "On the Road." He recalls taking several evenings to get through it, partially because of the density of Kerouac's language and partially because, he says, "After you read some of the wonderful lines, you sit and put it down for a bit and think of this wonderful journey, especially when you're living under the roof of your mother."

Hedlund already knew that he was going to move to Los Angeles to pursue acting after high school. He did a little research and discovered that Francis Ford Coppola had owned the rights to "On the Road" for years. The teenager figured it was a missed opportunity.

"I was just a kid in high school and I thought, 'I'll never get a shot at this.' Who was I?" he says.

But Coppola, who remains on board as executive producer, eventually ceded the directing reins to Walter Salles and the years passed. Hedlund moved west as planned after graduation and started amassing credits. He made his screen debut at 19 in Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 epic "Troy," joining a large, glamorous cast that included Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Eric Bana, Julie Christie and Peter O'Toole. That same year, he was among the young stars of "Friday Night Lights." Appearances in "Four Brothers" (2005), "Eragon" (2006), "Georgia Rule" (2007) and "Death Sentence" (2007) followed.

In November 2006, he received Jose Rivera's "On the Road" script, along with word that Salles wanted to meet him. Months passed and Hedlund began to despair that the meeting would ever happen. He traveled back to Minnesota for what he thought would be an extended stay, but he was only there a few days when the call he'd been awaiting finally came. He needed to be back in Los Angeles in three days, prepared to audition three scenes, including one long monologue.

Driving around

"I never thought I'd be able to get everything down, so I ended up using that time in Minnesota, because it's all just back roads and country roads and I have a buddy up there who has his own farm and we were driving around," he says. "He has a similar sort of build as Kerouac. He was the state champion wrestler, and we were just sort of driving around, being debaucherous. I had my notepad, and he understood I'd read him the lines, and so it kind of personalized it in a weird way prior to going and sitting in the casting room.

"I wrote about the whole adventure. It's probably 20 pages or something. I could go in to Walter and apologize, saying, 'This is a massive amount of material for me to get down, but maybe I can read you this writing.' It was kind of almost an excuse, but I got everything down and finally at the end of the reading of all this material, I asked if I would be able to share my writing with him, so, yeah, that was the beginning."

That was in March 2007. He read for Salles a second time in July that year. His 23rd birthday present on Sept. 3, 2007, was getting word from the director that he had gotten the part. It would be three more years before Hedlund fulfilled that 17-year-old high school kid's dream and stepped before the cameras opposite Sam Riley as Kerouac's alter ego Sal Paradise and Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst as the women in Dean's life.

'Dear to my heart'

"This one so dear to my heart, Hedlund says. "Being able to meet with (Neal Cassady's son) John Cassady in Frisco and sit down with a notepad and hang and have some wine and ciggies and just sit back and hear stories of his father that nobody got to hear, to sit down with Carolyn Cassady in London in her trailer house, and read her some of the writings that I had done, and have some wine and some ciggies and sit back.

"Me and Walter got to go out to Berkeley and hang with Michael McClure. I got to see a lot of tapes of Kerouac and writings that no one had gotten to see before and stories that were very personal. Being on this project has meant the world to me." {sbox}